Jimmy Santiago Baca to appear at Bookworks

Jimmy Santiago Baca is one of New Mexico's treasures—the living, breathing kind. Born in Santa Fe, he spent five years in prison back in the '70s on drug charges. Since then, with words as words sharp and clear as a knife, he's become an award-winning poet and a powerful voice for social justice.

Usually this blog column is used to highlight the first lines of a plethora of new works of fiction. But since I just read and reviewed Ted Heller’s Pocket Kings—a novel about a novelist full of quotes from said novelist's fake novels—I thought I'd just draw from there.

"It is a cold and harrowing morning in the life of a man the day he wakes up, looks at himself in the mirror, and finally realizes that he is not, never has been, nor will ever be George Clooney.”

—Opening line to Ted Heller's Pocket Kings

"In the small village in which my grandmother was born, the giant men flew down from the violet mountain mists after every monsoon season to take our women away."

—Heller's protagonist Frank W. Dixon positing the kind of opening line that usually gratifies NY Times book critics

"Things were very bad then but still we carried on."

—The opening line to one of Dixon's books; an opening line that Dixon is incredibly proud of

“An hour late to work I’m riding the D train to work in a short tight black BCBG mini skirt and not only do I feel Seth the Sommelier dribbling down my right thigh but I also see some of Antonio the Busboy sticking to my left calf.”

—The lead sentence from Saucier: A Bitch in the Kitchen, a novel Dixon reads and criticizes within Pocket Kings

More novel openers to weigh against “Call me Ishmael”

“If you had been across the street, pretending to investigate the local summer roses outside Holliday’s Flower Shop, you could have seen them through the café’s plate glass, the two sitting in the booth by a window, eating lunch.”

-What You See in the Dark, Manuel Muñoz

“The left engine backfired again and began to stumble as Jabe Rainwater rolled the old Beechcraft left and right in an effort to drain the last of the fuel from his nearly bone-dry wing tanks.”

-Bad Medicine, R. Barry King

“Just as the keynote address was winding down, the rain came hissing up the little valley in sheets.”

-West of Here, Jonathan Evison

“‘Read this,’ my father said as he tossed a leather-bound journal at my chest, trying to catch me by surprise.”